William has roughly shorn away Bismarck’s pretence to infallibility, but about the divine nature of his own claims he has no doubt. Some of his deliverances on questions of morals and ethics, in his capacity as a sort of helmeted Northern Pope, are calculated to bring a smile to the face of the Muse of History. His celebrated harangue to the Rector of the Berlin University, Professor Gebhardt, wherein he complained that, under the lead of democratic professors, the students were filled with destructive political doctrines, and concluded by gruffly saying, “Let your students go more to churches and less to beer cellars and fencing saloons”—was put down to his youth, for it dates from the close of 1888. It is interesting to note, from William’s recent speech at Bonn, that he has decidedly altered his views on both beer-drinking and duelling among students. He began his reign, however, with ultra-puritanical notions on these as well as other subjects.
Long after this early deliverance his confidence in himself, so far from suffering abatement, had so magnified itself that he called the professors of another University together and lectured them upon the bad way in which they taught history. He had discovered, he said, that there was now much fondness for treating the French Revolution as a great political movement, not without its helpful and beneficent results. This pernicious notion must no longer be encouraged in German universities, but students should be taught to regard the whole thing as one vast and unmitigated crime against God and man.
In this dogmatic phase of his character William is much more like Frederic William I than like any of his nearer ancestors in the Hohenzollern line. These later monarchs, beginning with Frederic the Great and following his luminous example, were habitually chary about bothering themselves with their subjects’ opinions. William at one time thought a good deal upon the fact that he was a successor of Frederic the Great, and by fits and starts set himself to imitate the earlier acts of that sovereign. His restless flying about from place to place, and, even more clearly, his edicts rebuking the army officers for gambling and for harshness to their men, were copied from that illustrious original. But in his attitude toward the mental and moral liberty of his subjects he goes back a generation to Frederic’s father—and suggests to us also the reflection that he is a grandson of that highly self-confident gentleman whom English-speaking people knew as the Prince Consort.
Frederic the Great had so little of this spirit in him that he made himself memorably unique among eighteenth-century sovereigns by allowing such freedom to the press that liberty sank into license, and the most scandalous and mendacious attacks upon his personal life were printed in and hawked about Berlin to the end of his days. As for his refusal to interfere in the alleged perversion of Protestant children by Catholic teachers, his comment on the margin of the ministerial complaint, “In this country every man must get to heaven in his own way,” is justly cherished to this day as worth all his other writings put together.
William’s spasms, so to speak, of imitative loyalty to the memories of his ancestors have been productive of many curious, not to say diverting, results. Their progressive consecutiveness is not always easy to make out, but they afford, as a whole, very interesting insights into the young man’s temperament.
When tragic chance thrust him forward and upon the throne, his youthful imagination happened to be in some mysterious way under the spell of that most astounding of all his forefathers, Frederic William I. He spoke frequently with enthusiasm of the character of this rude, choleric barbarian, and even brought himself to believe that there was something fine in that strange creature’s inability to speak any language but German. It was under the sway of this admiration for the second Prussian King that William, in January of 1889, had all the French cooks in his palaces discharged, and ordered that hereafter the royal bill of fare should be a Speisekarte, with the names of dishes in German, instead of the accustomed menu in French. It will not, however, have escaped notice that William is a changeable young man, and this ultra-Teutonic mood did not last very long. In the following autumn he had so far recovered from it that his visit to Constantinople was reported to have been marred by the Sultan’s mistaken hospitality in giving him nothing but German champagnes to drink. It must be admitted, however, that scarcely the most robust prejudice could stand out long under such a test.
In the spring of 1890 there came the 150th anniversary of the accession of Frederic the Great, and with it a sudden shift in the young Kaiser’s admiration. For a long time thereafter he made no speech without alluding to this most splendid figure in Prussian history, and quoting him as an example to be followed with reverential loyalty.
Then in December came the turn of still a third bygone Hohenzollern. It was on December 1, 1640, that the youth of twenty, who was later to be known as the Great Elector, entered upon the herculean task of saving hapless, bankrupt little Brandenburg from literal annihilation. William has told us that as a boy he scarcely learned anything at all about this illustrious ancestor of his. Apparently little had been done to make good this lack of information up to the time when, toward the close of 1890, he found that the Great Elector’s 250th anniversary was near at hand, and felt that it ought to be celebrated. He began reading the history of that memorable reign, and was at once excitedly interested and impressed. There has always been a charming, if childish, naivete about the manner in which William frankly exposes his mental processes, and, having just heard of something for the first time which everybody else knows, brings it forward to public notice as if it were a fresh and most remarkable discovery. The effect produced upon him by his belated introduction to the life and works of the last Elector affords an apt illustration of this tendency. At the celebration William made a long speech in eulogy of his ancestor, which in every sentence seemed to take it for granted that heretofore no one had written or thought or known about the Great Elector. Since that time the young Emperor has rarely spoken in public, at least to a Prussian audience, without some reference to this distinguished predecessor—whereas we never hear now of either Frederic the Great or his savage father.
Doubtless the fervour with which William has adopted the Great Elector as his model ancestor is in large part due to the fact that the latter’s first important act was the summary dismissal of his father’s Prime Minister, Schwarzenberg. The parallel to be drawn between the disgrace of this powerful favourite and the fall of Bismarck is often faulty and nowhere exact, but it is evident that it impressed William’s imagination greatly when he came upon it, and that he could not resist the temptation to suggest it to the world at large. In this same anniversary speech he said: “My stout ancestor had no one to lean upon.”
The eminent statesman who had served his predecessor was revealed to have worked for his own personal ends, and the young sovereign was forced to mark out his own path unaided. The comparison was a cruel one, because the manner in which Schwarzenberg “worked for his own personal ends” was that of taking bribes to betray his royal master and his country. Yet the loose phrase could also describe Bismarck’s hot-headed use of his vast governmental powers to crush his individual enemies, and in this sense every one felt that William was instituting a comparison.